6 Frames of Architecture on Lomography Redscale – by Christian Schroeder

Lomography Redscale: I confess, I have been avoiding this film way too long. Weird material, I thought, will give you only crappy results. Oh, but you like orange explosions? Good for you, go ahead! – Read on to find out how wrong I was.

Using Lomography Redscale for the First Time

For my recent birthday in March, my girlfriend gifted me a variety of rather uncommon films. Among them were two rolls of Lomography Redscale in 35mm. This brought me to a short research on Instagram, which yielded quite convincing results. Definitely: I had underestimated the capabilities of this material. I liked images the most when the film was exposed rather generously – Lomography suggests an ISO range from 50 to 200. Less light gives a rather pronounced effect, more intense orange and yellow. So I fed the film into my Canon SLR and – as I preferred a more subtle effect – rated it at 40.

As usual with new (to me) films – and the Redscale making no difference here –, I decided to play safe first and went for some bread-and-butter subjects. In my case, this means buildings in my close neighborhood. Well, I have taken many images of these houses before – but the unusual film should provide me with a new facet of them, I thought. To further deviate from the familiar path, I planned to use the tilt function of my tilt-shift lens. Tilting the focus plane can create this miniature-world effect that was quite popular ten years ago. So I waited until the sun was about to set and made a dash.

On the Results

So, how did my photographs turn out? Well… Although I rated the Redscale at a rather low ISO, all tilt images appear quite dark and moody. But: I really like that! Interestingly, all regular images (without a tilt effect) turned out bright and evenly lit. The lens’ open aperture in combination with the tilted focus plane seem to cause a heavy vignette, which isn’t that pronounced with other film stocks (at least I haven’t noticed it before). Color-wise the images reveal a restraint character, as preferred.

Now I absolutely want to shoot more of this stuff! Next time, I am also going to use it under intense sun, to achieve that baking oven look. As much as I like the normal film stocks like Kodak Portra or Fuji Superia and rely on them – they tend to get boring after a while. Specialty films like Lomography Redscale let me get excited again, when my surroundings can’t. A experienced a similar effect when I shot Lomography’s Metropolis and Purple films last summer.

Images on Lomography Redscale

Thanks for reading!

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